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# The Word "Laboratory"
- URL: https://www.sweatyspice.com/the-word-laboratory-b2-a3-e3/
- Published: 2026-10-30T15:00:46.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-30T15:00:45.000Z
- Description: Reagan called the Soviets the focus of evil, then nearly gave away every nuclear weapon in sight. His own cabinet said whoa, whoa, not like that.
- Author: Geoff Anderson
- Tags: The Fulcrum: how Reagan was the pivotal point in conservatism

Series: [The Fulcrum](https://www.sweatyspice.com/tag/the-fulcrum/), Book Two: The Performance, Act Three: The Presidency, Episode 3 

At the end of two days of talks in Iceland on October 12, 1986, the leader of the Soviet Union asked the president of the United States to give up one word. Mikhail Gorbachev wanted research on missile defense kept inside laboratories for ten years. Ronald Reagan said he could not forget the pledge he had made to Americans to find out whether his missile shield would work. By then Reagan had [offered](https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2011-09/features/reykjavik-when-abolition-was-within-reach?ref=sweatyspice.com) to share the technology ten times over. Gorbachev's answer was that the Americans wouldn't even share milking machines.

Reagan [asked](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reykjav%C3%ADk%5FSummit?ref=sweatyspice.com) whether Gorbachev would "turn down a historic opportunity because of a single word." The man across the table, who had come to Iceland carrying the most radical arms proposal in the history of the Cold War, said that he would. The word was "laboratory," and it had more to do with how this presidency worked than anything Reagan said in front of a microphone.

### Orlando

*The speech everyone quotes was written for a ballroom full of evangelicals.*

To see what the word cost, go back three and a half years, to a hotel ballroom in Orlando. On March 8, 1983, Reagan spoke to the [National Association of Evangelicals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil%5FEmpire%5Fspeech?ref=sweatyspice.com), the same constituency the previous episodes of this book spent most of their length building. He called the Soviet Union "the focus of evil in the modern world," and his chief speechwriter, Anthony Dolan, supplied the phrase that gave the speech its name. He also took aim at the nuclear freeze movement, warning against the temptation to declare both sides equally at fault and to ignore the facts of history.

It is a remarkable performance for what it was. The audience came to be told that their moral instincts were correct, and Reagan told them. The Christian Science Monitor warned that the rhetoric would encourage an arms race. The Soviet press agency TASS answered with its own denunciation of the administration's appetite for confrontation. The phrase outlived the sentence it was written in and became the cleanest summary of Reagan's foreign policy that his admirers have ever had.

It is also, like most clean summaries, only half the story.

### Fifteen days later

*The shield he couldn't give up announced itself in a television address.*

On March 23, Reagan went on television and [asked](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic%5FDefense%5FInitiative?ref=sweatyspice.com) the scientific community to give the country the means of rendering nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete." Critics promptly renamed the program "Star Wars," a label that stuck harder than any argument for or against it. The physics did not cooperate. Hans Bethe said the X-ray laser offered no prospect of being a useful component of a defense system, and a 1987 American Physical Society review concluded that every candidate directed-energy weapon needed improvements of two or more orders of magnitude.

The Soviets took it very seriously anyway. Declassified material shows the Kremlin saw space-based defenses as something that could make nuclear war more likely, not less. Hold that thought, because it cuts two ways. A program that never worked was also a program Moscow could not afford to ignore, and a president who treated it as non-negotiable had just handed himself a veto over his own greatest opportunity.

### The bad autumn

*Four weeks in 1983 taught Reagan what the Soviets were actually afraid of.*

On October 23, a bombing in Beirut [killed 241](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United%5FStates%5Finvasion%5Fof%5FGrenada?ref=sweatyspice.com) American servicemen, the deadliest single attack on Americans overseas since the Second World War. Two days later, the United States invaded Grenada. The stated reasons were roughly six hundred American medical students on the island and a request from neighboring Caribbean states. Critics noted that the students said they felt safe, and the UN General Assembly condemned the invasion, 108 to 9\. Between 19 and 24 American servicemen died. Whether Grenada was a rescue, a show of force, or an unusually well-timed change of subject two days after Beirut is a question the record does not settle, and anyone who claims it does has an agenda.

Then in early November came [Able Archer 83](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able%5FArcher%5F83?ref=sweatyspice.com), a NATO exercise Soviet intelligence may have read as cover for a first strike. Historians still argue about how close it came, but declassified material confirms Soviet nuclear forces were put on alert. On November 20, roughly 100 million Americans watched [The Day After](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The%5FDay%5FAfter?ref=sweatyspice.com), ABC's television film about a nuclear attack on Kansas. Reagan wrote in his diary that it left him "greatly depressed."

Taken together, the sequence changed what he thought he knew. He later wrote that he came to believe many people at the top of the Soviet hierarchy were "genuinely afraid of America and Americans." For a man who had just denounced the other side as the focus of evil in the modern world, that was an interesting thing to discover.

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### The turn

*The hawk and the abolitionist were the same man, and he did not feel the contradiction.*

The [Miller Center's account](https://millercenter.org/reagan-and-cold-war?ref=sweatyspice.com) of this period is that Reagan held contradictory goals at once, and that scholars have never settled whether he meant to win the Cold War or end it. After Gorbachev took power, the second impulse began to dominate. At Geneva in November 1985, the two leaders [agreed](https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/joint-soviet-united-states-statement-the-summit-meeting-geneva?ref=sweatyspice.com) that "a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought." The sentence was a headline in 1985\. It is now such a standard of arms control language that it is easy to forget it was a statement by the man who had given the Orlando speech.

What makes the turn interesting is how lonely it was. Reagan's abolitionism, per the Arms Control Association's reading, was real, and he was close to the only one in Washington pushing for the end of mutual deterrence. His own bureaucracy was not following him there.

### Reykjavik

*Two men nearly agreed to abolish the bomb, and the deal broke on a clause.*

By the account of the [Arms Control Association](https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2011-09/features/reykjavik-when-abolition-was-within-reach?ref=sweatyspice.com), the two leaders sketched cutting strategic offensive weapons in half within five years and eliminating all nuclear explosive devices by 1996\. Reagan even suggested meeting in Iceland in 1996 to destroy the last missiles. Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze pleaded that future generations would not forgive them if the chance slipped away.

It slipped away over SDI. Gorbachev wanted the research confined to labs, and Reagan would not accept the restriction. By his own account, he was keeping a promise to the public. By Gorbachev's, he was keeping a toy.

Then came the fallout, and here the story gets strange. The people horrified by the near-deal were not Reagan's critics, they were his allies. Margaret Thatcher was reported to be shocked that the nuclear deterrent had come so close to being traded away. Within the administration, George Shultz [recalled](https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/110620?ref=sweatyspice.com) that Defense Secretary Weinberger, National Security Adviser Poindexter, and many at the State Department saw Reykjavik as a "blunder of the greatest magnitude." Poindexter's view, as Shultz relayed it, was that eliminating nuclear weapons would be a catastrophe. Shultz himself thought the summit a stupendous success, because the concessions that came out of it could not be taken back.

So the hawk's speech to the evangelicals was the performance, and the offer in Iceland was the man. The administration that built its identity on his toughness spent the weeks after Reykjavik walking his proposals back.

### What it bought

*The failure turned out to be a down payment.*

The INF Treaty, signed in Washington on December 8, 1987, eliminated an entire class of nuclear missiles, and the Reykjavik talks had shown each side [how much the other would concede](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reykjav%C3%ADk%5FSummit?ref=sweatyspice.com). That is the quiet argument for the summit as a success: it was a rehearsal that made the later treaty possible.

It also feeds the argument that has outlived the decade, about who won the Cold War and how. The triumphalist version says the buildup and the speeches broke the Soviet system. The historian Melvyn Leffler argues, in the Miller Center's account, that Reagan's real significance came less from the arms buildup and ideological offensive of 1981 than from his later desire to abolish nuclear weapons and negotiate reductions. The declassified evidence that Moscow feared SDI suggests pressure counted for something, and the evidence that the Soviet system was failing from the inside suggests it was not the whole story. Both can be partly right, and neither fits on a bumper sticker, which is why the bumper sticker version won.

---

The version that survived the canonization kept the Orlando speech and dropped the offer in Iceland. A hawk who wanted to abolish nuclear weapons is a harder figure to put on a stamp than a hawk who called the Soviets evil, and the party that now invokes his name has been more comfortable with the second one than the first.

Reykjavik ended in a stalemate on a single word. A few weeks later the Iran-Contra story broke, and the administration's attention went somewhere else entirely. The shield that cost Reagan the deal never materialized in the form he described. The deal he walked away from is still sitting in the archives.

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